New Diff Compare Application for OS X
Posted by: Jon Clausen
Since I switched to a Mac a couple of years ago, I've found that, for most of my development work, my productivity has increased or remained the same between the applications I was familiar with on Windows and those available for the Mac.
One exception to this, however, has been the lack of a solid file/folder comparison utility. Beyond Compare for Windows, is IMHO the best file and folder comparison utility bar none and it's been sorely missed as a Mac convert. When I've got a particularly complex series of files which need to be merged, I'll often open up a Parallels virtual machine just to use BC.
I've tried several decent utilities on the Mac, including Guiffy and ZSCompare. Both are very adequate for basic, single file, comparisons but fall short when dealing with complex directory structures and significant differences in whitespace between files.
Today I stumbled on a post over at Ranchero today cross-linking to a new Leopard-native file comparison utility for the Mac, just released, called Changes.
After downloading and running some test comparisons, I'm mightily impressed. It may not be Beyond Compare just yet, but it has some very, very nice features - including a very robust exclusion filter which excludes .svn,.cvs, and .DS_Store files from the directory merging process - and a great deal of potential. It also has adjustable code coloring and a customizable interface.
The price is also right - free to download and try and $35 for a license. It's also lightning fast compared to the Java-based diff utilities.
Track with co.mments